Feuding in 140 Characters

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CreditMatt Huynh

By Henry Alford

April 25, 2014

In days of yore, if you were famous and hot under the collar, you stumbled over to your nemesis’ booth at the Musso & Frank Grill and hurled a martini or Sidecar into the object of your opprobrium’s face. By the 1960s, your arena had changed: You deployed the jeweled rapiers and poisoned darts of your animus on “The Dick Cavett Show” or in the letters section of The New York Review of Books. Today, you turn on your iPhone and tweet, “miley is a byotch!”

Does the medium by which we hold grudges and wage feuds affect the shelf life of those grudges and feuds? Mr. Cavett, whose talk show represented a golden age of feuding, as in Gore Vidal versus Norman Mailer and Lillian Hellman versus Mary McCarthy, thinks so. He said: “Twitter may have made it easier to get over grudges and feuds. It puts people in direct contact with their grudgee or feudee.”

Indeed, social media often escalates disagreements more rapidly than they might have escalated on their own offline, which may help feuders to move past their rancor. But social media also fosters a lot of arguments started for the sake of starting arguments. Philip Kerr, the British crime novelist who edited “The Penguin Book of Fights, Feuds and Heartfelt Hatreds,” said: “One person will tweet this, and another will tweet that, and before you know it, as we say in England, it’s handbags. Meaning, you’re two effete idiots trying to hit each other with handbags.”

On the upside, though, social media creates a public record of a dispute, which may help feuders remember what they’re arguing about. Mr. Kerr said, “The reasons for a feud can get lost so far back in history that they’re impossible to unravel.” Over time, honor eclipses content, and feuds accumulate into an indistinguishable mass of gray matter, like a clothes dryer’s lint drawer. You look down at your hand and wonder, What’s this handbag doing here?

In many cases, taking a disagreement public (whether it’s online or face to face) clears the air. Take the example of the actress Sylvia Miles. In 1973, John Simon referred in a play review to the social and popular Ms. Miles as a “gate-crasher.” (Mr. Simon is the theater critic who once compared Liza Minnelli’s face to a beagle’s and another time called Kathleen Turner a “braying mantis.”) In a recent phone interview, Ms. Miles said: “ ‘Gate-crasher’? I was the Gwyneth Paltrow of the day!”

So, shortly after the review ran, Ms. Miles tracked down Mr. Simon at a New York Film Festival event, where he was talking to the director Robert Altman. “I went to the buffet table and took a plate and put coleslaw, quiche, potato salad and paté on it,” Ms. Miles said. “Then I dumped the food on his head. I said, ‘Now you can call me a plate-crasher, too.’ ”

Asked how the act made her feel, Ms. Miles said: “Justified. That’s the only word I can come up with. Justified.” Moreover, Ms. Miles’s act seems to have purged her of her animosity. “We’ve seen each other millions of time after that, and have always said hello,” she said. “I don’t hold a grudge. I don’t even like that word. It’s low-class,” she said, chuckling throatily. Then, suddenly serious: “I’m a semanticist. Do you know what that is?”

But in other cases, the public airing of vitriol seems only to increase the lather quotient. Witness the recent dust-up on Twitter between the comedian Kathy Griffin and the singer-actress Demi Lovato’s fans. After Ms. Griffin tweeted an insulting remark about Ms. Lovato, Ms. Lovato’s fans lashed back. Their threats to Ms. Griffin were so vitriolic (with mentions of rape, cancer, murder, suicide) that Ms. Griffin said she was contacted by the police.

If the ease with which you can vent your spleen in public today is responsible for quickening the cycle of feuds and for increasing their number, it may also be responsible for making them less witty. Let’s compare two feuds about artistic ego: last year’s Jimmy Kimmel versus Kanye West, and 1971’s Mailer versus Vidal and Cavett.

The Kimmel-West feud started when Mr. Kimmel’s show hired a child actor to play Mr. West in a re-enactment of an interview Mr. West gave to the BBC in which he claimed he was “the No. 1 rock star on the planet.” Annoyed by the Kimmel sketch, Mr. West took to Twitter, writing to Mr. Kimmel, among other things: “You can’t put yourself in my shoes. Your face looks crazy ... is that funny? ... Or if I had a kid say it would it be funny?” and also asserting that Mr. Kimmel’s former girlfriend, the comedian Sarah Silverman, was funnier than Mr. Kimmel. Then Mr. West called Mr. Kimmel, demanding a public apology. (“Finally, I’m in a rap feud,” Mr. Kimmel reported on his show. “I always wanted to be in a rap feud.”)

When a mostly sullen Mr. West appeared on Mr. Kimmel’s show to discuss the matter, Mr. Kimmel said: “When you said you think you’re a genius, I think that upsets people. But the truth is, a lot of people think they’re geniuses, but nobody says it because it’s weird to say.” Mr. West replied, “I’m totally weird and totally honest and I’m totally inappropriate sometimes, and the thing is for me not to say I’m a genius I’d be lying to you and to myself.” The mood of the episode over all: war crimes tribunal meets therapy session.

Conversely, the 1971 feud started when Mr. Vidal wrote a negative review of Mr. Mailer’s book “The Prisoner of Sex,” saying there was a direct link from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson — “M3 for short.” In their subsequent appearance on Mr. Cavett’s show, Mr. Mailer refused to shake hands with Mr. Vidal and accused Mr. Vidal of having called him a “hugely Raskolnikovian figure.” Mr. Vidal sallied forth with various bon mots, at one point smiling so much he had to cover his mouth. Mr. Mailer said, “Everyone here is smaller than I am.” Mr. Cavett asked him what he meant. Mr. Mailer said, “Smaller intellectually.” So Mr. Cavett suggested, “Perhaps you’d like two more chairs for your giant intellect?” Mr. Mailer said, “Why don’t you look at your question sheet and ask your questions?” Mr. Cavett said, “Why don’t you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine.” The episode’s overall mood: Friars roast meets Monty Python.

In some cases, the net effect of this lack of wit in modern-day feuds is a lengthening of their shelf life — in the public’s mind at least. To hear a magisterial put-down artist like Mr. Vidal disown the producer Bob Guccione’s film version of Mr. Vidal’s screenplay “Caligula” with “They will give vulgarity a bad name,” or to hear him dismiss Truman Capote by saying, “Every generation gets the Tiny Tim that it deserves” is to be strangely reassured, and to be reminded that one is in the hands of a great, if yeasty, entertainer. But to read much of today’s political or show business mudslinging is often to be made uneasy: The brain calculates, This isn’t funny, so it must be heartfelt?

If you want to move past your grudge, but you don’t have the gift of wit or the courage to step unto the breach of Twitter or a fistfight, what should you do? Mr. Cavett has a suggestion. “I love the Oscar Wilde quote: ‘Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.’ It’s sort of, ‘How dare he forgive me!’ ”

Indeed, Mr. Kerr, the novelist, knows whereof Mr. Cavett speaks. Some years ago, Mr. Kerr went to a lunch attended by a book reviewer he was feuding with. “Beforehand, my wife said: ‘You know what you do? You should be really nice to him. Really kind.’ So I greeted him like he was the Dalai Lama. All through the lunch, I could see him shifting about, thinking, ‘Gosh, did I do something wrong?’ And at the end of the lunch, he brought it up. He said, ‘I think I might have reviewed you unkindly once.’ I said: ‘Did you? Not a problem. These things happen. Don’t worry about it.’ Boy, did that work. I walked away thinking, My God. What a triumph.”

Sometimes the lance is boiled. Sometimes it is not. “Very often the word poison comes up with feuds and grudges,” Mr. Cavett said. “You’ll hear quotes from Buddha or Will Rogers about how you poison yourself with these toxic feelings. Or feuders are advised to hug the other person because supposedly it’s impossible to hug someone and still be angry. But I think I could manage it. Especially if it were Dick Cheney.”

HENRY ALFORD is the author of “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners.” Circa Now appears monthly.